'I was educated not to think': How Hitler's architect escaped the death penalty

Albert Speer distanced himself from the Nazis' atrocities at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in October 1946, and, upon his release from prison, he carefully rebuilt his public image. In History revisits a 1970 BBC interview with Hitler's former friend.

On 16 October 1946, 10 Nazi officials were hanged after being convicted at the first international war crimes tribunal at Nuremberg. Some of those who faced trial for their roles in World War Two, such as the flamboyant and unrepentant Hermann Goering, were senior Nazi leaders with clear responsibility. Others were more junior, standing trial in place of more infamous figures such as Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels, who had taken their own lives. The 21 defendants were accused of committing mindboggling atrocities, including the newly defined crime of genocide.

One of those who lived to tell the tale was Albert Speer, the youthful and confident figure who served first as Adolf Hitler's architect and later as minister for war production. Rather than claiming at Nuremberg that he had only been obeying orders, Speer's careful survival strategy was to distance himself from Hitler, while accepting from the outset the collective responsibility of the defendants for their crimes. After serving 20 years in prison, he became a media darling whose bestselling memoir burnished his image as the "good Nazi". But was his acceptance of responsibility genuine remorse or just a manipulation to save his neck?

The choice of Nuremberg for the trials was significant. In their pomp a few years earlier, the Nazis had staged large-scale propaganda rallies in the city. At the heart of these sinister spectacles was Speer's Cathedral of Light, consisting of hundreds of searchlights piercing the night sky. According to the art critic Robert Hughes, Speer was "for a time, not only the most powerful architect in the world, but perhaps the most powerful one who has ever lived". In Hitler's vision, the Third Reich was going to last 1,000 years, and so must its buildings.

The ambitious architect was aged 25 when he joined the Nazi Party in 1931, two years before Hitler assumed power in Germany. Historian Heike Görtemaker observed: "Hitler saw himself as an artist, an architect. When he met Speer, he saw in this young man an alter ego; the architect he couldn't become." Hitler's patronage handed Speer the power to execute his vision.

Interviewed by the BBC's Michael Charlton in 1970, Speer said he now considered Hitler to be one of the most evil people in history. However, he recalled how his friend "had some charm, too" and was "quite a normal human being". He said: "I thought it's necessary to tell this because after the war, we had a period when Hitler was described as a carpet-biter and as somebody who was always raging from day to night. And this would be a danger for the future because if now a new Hitler would come somewhere and he isn't carpet-biting and he doesn't rage from day to night, one would say, 'That's no danger – he's not Hitler.' But Hitler, as a person, he had many different sides. He was a human being."

Speer was asked how, as "an intelligent man, a man of some honesty", he failed to see Hitler's regime was a criminal one. Did he just accept it? Speer told Charlton that he was now a different person to the man he was at the end of the war. "In 1945, I was a technocrat. I was educated to think in my environment, not to think in the general. In school, we were obliged to learn our lessons, but there was no discussion about the problems of politics. We were almost shunning away from those problems, and we were not prepared to think thoroughly about some man like Hitler when he came."

Speer also claimed to be no different from anyone else in his generation who was seduced by the Nazi leader. "Hitler himself was appearing in a time which was to us young people a time of disillusionment. It was a time, we had no hope for our future, and now a man came and said you shall have hope, we can do it, we can manage it, Germany is prospering again. Of course it was a temptation big enough to think about."

Alamy

But surely alarm bells should have rung? In 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, the SS murdered around 400 of Hitler's opponents. Speer was sent to repurpose the office of Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen into security headquarters. In his memoir Inside the Third Reich, Speer recalled seeing a pool of dried blood where one of Papen's aides had been shot. "I looked away and from then on avoided the room," he wrote. He told Charlton: "It is a complete moral failure of mine not to have had any reactions, and it would be wrong to make now any excuses. In fact, I saw this bloodstain and I shoved it away in my memory. It was no more existent, and I was going on to work. If I would have only a little bit thought about it, I should have gone away from Hitler in this moment. But I didn't."

One of the most powerful men in the Third Reich

Speer would never get to fulfil his most ambitious architectural project: a complete rebuilding of Berlin, which was to be renamed Germania, future capital of the world. At its heart, Speer envisaged a vast north-south avenue, culminating in a Great Hall with a dome 16 times higher than St Peter's in Rome. It's thought that the interior would have been so vast that when filled with the breath of 180,000 gathered Nazis, rainclouds may have formed in the ceiling. Instead, in 1939 Hitler started World War Two, and plunged Europe into six years of hell.

In 1942, he made Speer minister for arms production, drawing upon his extraordinary organisational skills to meet the demands of total war. At the age of 37, the architect was now one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich. To keep feeding the Nazi war machine with firepower, Speer used slave labour in his factories, mines and quarries. More than seven million forced labourers were employed by German industry, heavily concentrated in the armament sector overseen by Speer. Some were worked to death in terrible conditions. Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper told the 1996 BBC Reputations documentary, The Nazi Who Said Sorry, that Speer knew what he was doing. "He had formidable methods of control and could use the concentration camp system if he wanted, but he got the work done, and that impressed Hitler," he said.

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At the Nuremberg trials, Speer had a devious strategy for defending himself against the charge of criminal use of slave labour. He offered up his former deputy, Fritz Sauckel, as a scapegoat. With none of Speer's eloquence or social sophistication, Sauckel was described by US prosecutor Robert Jackson as "the greatest and cruellest slaver since the Pharaohs of Egypt". Sauckel was hanged on 16 October 1946.

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Just after midnight on 30 September 1966, the now 61-year-old Speer walked out of Spandau Prison into the glare of the world's media who had gathered to get a glimpse of Hitler's former best friend. In 1969, Speer released his bestselling memoir, Inside the Third Reich. In interviews with everyone from the BBC to Playboy magazine, he artfully promoted an image of himself as a man who was deeply ashamed of his failure to discover the crimes of the Nazi regime.

But was Speer really a mere technocrat who had no idea about the evils of the Holocaust? Speer claimed it was at Nuremberg that he first heard of the mass murder of Jewish people. However, in 1971, a year after his first BBC interview, Harvard University historian Erich Goldhagen found that Speer had attended a conference of senior Nazis in October 1943 at which the SS head Himmler had spoken openly about "the extermination of the Jewish people". Speer's biographer Gitta Sereny told the BBC's Reputations that while she never managed to confirm that he had been there in person to hear "the worst speech in history", three of his close colleagues had attended and would have told him what Himmler said. "It makes no difference being there or not; from then, he knew," she said.

Speer was in London for another BBC interview in 1981 when he had a stroke in his hotel. He died that night at the age of 76. He had just published a new book, The Slave State: Heinrich Himmler's Masterplan for SS Supremacy. Görtemaker told the BBC this year: "A new book, a new story, a new interview and on the same day he died in a hotel in London with his secret girlfriend. Now the world became aware that he led a double life. No one knew about this girlfriend in London. Not his wife, not his children. Here, too, a double life, a betrayal. This is the typical Speer."

Not much of Speer's architecture remains; his buildings designed for a thousand-year Reich were mostly destroyed by the victorious Allies even before the Nuremberg trials began. His uncompleted rally building in Nuremberg now hosts a permanent exhibition that serves as a warning from history. But while the ruins of his architecture stand as a warning, Speer himself never fully admitted the part he played in building something far darker.

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